Published in 2023
9 hours and 54 minutes
Padma Viswanathan is a playwright, fiction writer and journalist. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including New Letters, Subtropics, and The Malahat Review, and she took first prize in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Her novel, The Toss of a Lemon, has been published in six countries, made bestseller lists in three, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Amazon.ca Best First Novel award.
Personal details: her husband, Geoffrey Brock, a poet and literary translator, lured her away from Montreal, where she was living when they met. She followed him to San Francisco; he followed her to Tucson; there was some dilly-dallying in India, Brazil and Italy. Now, they’re settled in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they are raising their two kids.
What is this book about?
From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.
Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.
Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip’s life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.
In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary thriller that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.
